Chapter 34 - The Bloodstained Heirloom
The blast wave hammered the helicopter like a giant fist, shattering the starboard avionics and shredding the tail rotor assembly. The aircraft went into an uncontrollable flat spin, skimming across the treetops of the frozen wilderness like a stone across ice.
Gabriel slammed against the bulkhead, his ribs screaming in white-hot agony. He didn't close his eyes. He wrapped his body entirely around Nora, absorbing the brutal impact as the helicopter belly-flopped onto a massive snowdrift, skidding two hundred yards through pine trees before coming to a violent stop inside the snow-buried ruins of an abandoned open-pit mining terminal.
Smoke filled the compartment. The pilot lay slumped over the controls, dead on impact.
Gabriel kicked the mangled passenger door outward with a savage blow. Cold air rushed into the burning fuselage. Sarah stumbled out, coughing blood from a cracked rib, her submachine gun drawn and charged.
"Convoy is two miles out," Sarah wheezed, checking her tactical wrist display. "They saw our crash vector. They will be here in eight minutes."
Gabriel carried Nora out into the knee-deep snow, moving swiftly beneath the shadow of a colossal rusted ore-crusher. The wind had died down, replaced by an eerie, suffocating silence broken only by the crackle of their burning aircraft.
Nora sat on a wooden crate inside the machine shed, her tiny hands trembling as she took off her gold locket. She handed it to Gabriel. The back of the gold pendant was stained with a droplet of Gabriel's dried blood.
"Mama told me," Nora whispered, looking at the locket, "that when the iron bird crashes, I must give this to Gabriel. She said Gabriel is the iron wall."
Gabriel looked at the little girl, his heart clenching with overwhelming emotion. "Your mother planned this far ahead?"
"Julianna knew the rot in the Ashford family was absolute," Sarah said, loading a fresh magazine into her weapon. "Arthur killed his own son—Nora’s father—ten years ago in an orchestrated car crash because he refused to launder cartel blood money through the family foundation. Julianna spent five years gathering the forensic evidence. She left it all in the vault. But to unlock it, the system needs Nora’s physical presence at the high-security terminal inside the Canadian Border Patrol station at Eagle Pass."
"How far is Eagle Pass?" Gabriel asked, tightening the field dressing on his torn arm.
"Three miles across this ridge," Sarah replied. "Past the abandoned rail depot. But look down there."
Gabriel peered through a rusted gap in the shed's corrugated iron wall.
Down on the frozen access road, five armored black SUVs were roaring through the snow, their high-intensity searchlights cutting through the gloom. In the lead vehicle, standing in the open roof turret behind a mounted thermal scope, was Arthur Ashford, his shattered hand heavily splinted, his eyes blazing with psychopathic desperation.
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"He won't let us cross the border," Gabriel muttered, picking up an abandoned tactical shotgun from the snow. "He knows this is his execution if we do."
"Then we don't run anymore," Sarah said quietly, chambering a round. "We make them pay for every inch of snow."
